The SitePoint Forums have moved.

You can now find them here.
This forum is now closed to new posts, but you can browse existing content.
You can find out more information about the move and how to open a new account (if necessary) here.
If you get stuck you can get support by emailing forums@sitepoint.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Does Vistiors Equal High Bandwidth

I know that the more visitors to a community has the inevitable fact of more bandwidth being used.

What i am interested in is how much people see this.

EG How many members do you have?
How many Visitors do your have?
How much Bandwidth do you use?

The reason i ask is that there have been two problems i have found in australia when looking for a host traffic is very expensive around USD$35(AUD$70)/1Gb compared to as low as USD$15/1Gb for some others i have looked at in the US.

the other problem being the cheaper the the traffic the less requests on bacdkend configuration you can make.

Popularity of a site obviously affects bandwidth usage. But thanks to CSS, you don't have to be so highly graphical in your designs. If bandwidth is too costly, cut down on the graphics, optimize your HTML, and add caching headers, and you should notice some worthwhile improvements.

There are a lot of factors that go into this. If you are worried about bandwidth, avoid graphic-intensive sites, using JavaScript, offering downloads, etc. Also, such as in the case of vBulletin, make sure GZIP is enabled as this can drastically reduce bandwidth consumption.

In my case, I used over 15 GB last month and this was the first time I've gone over my hosting account's limit. I got a small fee tacked onto my monthly invoice and fortunately, it wasn't too harsh. I've decided to terminate my free headlines service because it was hogging too much bandwidth with too few benefits.